February global temperature rise proves nothing

The shrill article below is panicking over February temperatures so I suppose I should point out a few obvious things. I have really dealt with this nonsense before but a few comments anyway.

For a start, hanging anything on the figures for one month is dumb. You can have unusually hot months in a year where there is no overall change. Even figures for one year are rubbery. Figures for years can go up and down but still show no overall trend. You need a trend over a period of years to conclude anything. 2015 was a touch warmer but 2016 could be a touch cooler overall. If we get an early return of La Nina, the later months of 2016 could be cool in the same way that the early months were warm. That’s all elementary stuff — even if it is conspicuously overlooked below.

It was a bit boring writing all that freshman-level stuff above but I was listening to some Stravinsky while I wrote it so that kept me alert and happy.

But now to get onto the specifics about February 2016: According to NOAA (See here) The February 2016 temperature was 5.69¬∞F above the C20 average. That seems a lot. One can understand it being called “whopping”. But wait a minute. 2005 was 4.12¬∞F above the same average. Was that “whopping” too? Did that presage climate catastrophe? Ten years later we can say that it clearly didn’t. And February 2015 was -0.85¬∞F — BELOW average. Did that warn of an oncoming ice age? Clearly not. Hanging your hat on one month is brick thick. I really shouldn’t have to point out what excreta the article below is. Temperatures fluctuate but there is no statistically significant long-term trend.

So Feb 2016 was a bit higher than 2005. Why? Easy: El Nino. Despite what is said below, it was in fact TOTALLY due to El Nino. How do I know that? Because it was NOT due to a rise in CO2. The recent temperature rises did not fit neatly into any one year. They were concentrated in late 2015 and early 2016, And that is PRECISELY a period over which CO2 levels plateaued. From August 2015 to February 2016, CO2 levels have been stuck on 398 ppm, according to the Cape Grim data. CO2 levels over that period only varied by less than one part per million. Annual changes before that were around 2 parts per million.

The big Warmist story is that warming is due to CO2 levels. If that were so, the recent rise in temperature would be a mirror of rising CO2 levels. But the CO2 levels belie that. They didn’t rise. Once again temperature and CO2 are disconnected. So El Nino is the only explanation left for the recent temperature uptick. It is an entirely natural fluctuation with nothing to do with human actions. That’s what the data tells us. Do look up the Cape Grim data yourself to check it?

February shattered climate records, scientists worried we could see 2C warming within months.

Does everybody still believe global warming is a hoax? Yet more data confirms what scientists have feared for a long time, the planet is warming, and it may have passed a tipping point. The latest data now reveals that February 2016 was the hottest February on record, and it blew that record by a wide margin.

February is a cold month, especially in the northern hemisphere, so it’s surprising to see that it was so hot. And hot is the right word to use. According to climate data, the entire northern hemisphere was 2.43 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than average, and a full third of a degree hotter than the record.

Whens peaking of climate records, it is common to deal in tenths or even hundredths of a degree. To see a third of a degree, or, in this case, nearly two-and-a-half degrees, overall, is literally unprecedented. February 2016 is the first month in history that global average temperatures exceeded the 1.5 degree (Celsius) average.

Scientists also noted that the warmth was unusually concentrated in the Arctic, contributing to record ice melt and likely weather anomalies.